"...Come see the Amazing Armless Clams?" It was with a heavy sigh that Dipper read the hastily made poster for the Shack's latest attraction. "I don't even know where to start with this."

"At least Grunkle Stan's not lying." His sister held the sign to the gift shop door as he taped it up.

"Yeah...I think I'm just upset because some people are actually going to get excited over th-"

The conversation was interrupted by a hoarse cry from not too far off in the woods. Both twins froze and looked to one another. Not only was it an obvious yell of distress, but they'd recognize their friend's voice anywhere.

"C'mon….c'mon…." They could hear clearly hear Wendy struggle. "Oh, what gives?"

The sign lay half-hung as the siblings hurried off through the trees. Soon they spotted copper hair and green flannel only a few yards ahead. Wendy saw the tweens rushing towards her and immediately began to signal like mad to them. "Huh? Wait! Guys, stop! Stop!"

"Are you ok-" Dipper suddenly found himself buried up to his knees in an enormous coffee-and cream-colored puddle. It looked like regular mud, and it felt like mud. Yet as it immediately gripped his scrawny ankles with the force of dried cement, he quickly got the feeling that this wasn't everyday mud. "...Oh."

"Gross!" Mabel reflexively tried to crawl out, but couldn't even budge one foot. "Hey, what the...it's sticky!"

She redoubled her efforts to wriggle free, punctuating each try with a symphony of theatrical grunts. "It's super-super sticky! Stop being sticky, mud!"

"What is this stuff?" Dipper asked. The thick brown ooze trapped them so tightly might as well have been solid stone.

"I was on my way to my shift , and it was just….here." Explained a very bemused Wendy. It wasn't every day that a miniature mud pond appeared on her way to work, especially on a clear sunny morning like this.

"Uh oh." Dipper immediately got a nasty hunch. If the Gravity Falls native had no idea what she was looking at right now, then that could only meant one thing. Dread started to weigh on his gut like a lump of cold iron.

"What's wro-" Wendy watched him dig Journal Number 3 from his pocket and quickly gathered what was up with a groan. "Uh oh."

As usual, Mabel retained her usual optimism. "Don't worry! It can't be that bad! It's not like, a monster or demon or demon monster or anything."

"I don't know about bad, but this is definitely...actually, I'm reading about it right now and I still have no clue what this is." Dipper quickly found the relevant entry. Wendy peered over his shoulder.

"What's it called?"

"...Honesty Muck." The boy sighed. With a name as stupid as that, they were bound for trouble.

"Buck up, bro! No need to be such a..." Mabel couldn't help but seize upon this golden chance. She giggled and paused for effect. "A stick in the mud!"

All she got for her efforts was a pair of wordless stares. The tween huffed."Oh c'mon, that was comedy gold!"

"Uh...right." Dipper continued. "Patches of this strange mud will appear without warning throughout these woods. The first time I encountered it and its extreme quicksand-like properties, I almost lost my life. All that saved me from certain death was when in my blind panic, I confessed to a few long-held regrets. Telling it the truth is the key. It values honesty above all else."

"What's that even supposed to mean?" Wendy cocked her head. She had encountered some pretty strange things over the last several weeks, but this was weird even by their loose standards of normality.

"Honestly?" Dipper pulled a face. "I have no idea."

"So we're supposed tell it true things?" Mabel shot the muck a dubious look. "How can it even hear us? It doesn't even ears or like...other listening-y parts."

Dipper shrugged as he re-read the page. Wendy decided to go ahead and give the absurd theory a shot.

"Sooo….It's July…I'm wearing a hat…." She started listing off undeniable facts. "There's a big rock over there-"

To everyone's shock she promptly sank a further three inches with a soggy blorp. Dipper took out the black light and found a disclaimer scribbled in the margins. "'Don't be a smart-aleck. It really doesn't like that.' Okay, I guess that kind of...no, nevermind, that doesn't explain anything."

"Um...hey, Dipper?" Wendy asked.

"Yeah?" He scanned the page for any other helpful hints.

"….It's not stopping." The teen noted with alarm.

The boy's head jerked up to find that not only was she still steadily going down, but he was being pulled under too. With unseen force, the muck gripped his legs and slowly yanked. "Not good!"

"Sinkier! It's getting sinkier!" His sister was getting pulled down. "Too sinky!"

"What do we do?" Wendy gasped.

"Try telling it more true stuff!" Mabel yelped. "I'm adorable! I'm awesome at knitting sweaters! Waddles is the best pig in the entire world!"

"I have a sister! My eyes are brown!" shouted Dipper. .

"My last name is Corduroy! I'm wearing boots!" Wendy chimed in. Despite the fact that everything that came from their mouths was undeniably fact (mostly), the bubbling muck continued dragging them under, as if hellbent on sucking them all straight down into the deepest depths of the earth.

"I'm great at art!" Mabel had started to go hoarse with panic as her legs continued to vanish beneath her. "And matchmaking! And homemade pyrotechnics!"

"It's summer!" Wendy kept trying. "I have two eyes!"

They were now at waist-level with no signs of stopping. In a fit of frustration, Dipper banged his head against the old journal. As usual, its mysterious author was being maddeningly boy strained his brain trying to parse the book's enigmatic words.

"Honesty above all else…telling truth is key..." He frantically repeated the curious lines until suddenly it dawned on him with the force of a thunderbolt. "I GOT IT!"

"What?" Wendy gasped.

"Honesty!" He triumphantly crowed. " It's not obvious stuff it wants to hear!"

"...Wait, what?" The flummoxed teen repeated herself.

With precious little time to actually explain, Dipper decided to show them instead. Without delay he took a deep breath and announced to the world, "REVOLVING DOORS MAKE ME NERVOUS!"

The girls stopped thrashing and stared. Dipper winced; that confession had hurt a lot more coming out than he expected. But in spite of his surging embarrassment, he continued on. "Yeah, it's been like that forever. One time we went to the mall and the door was spinning so fast, I thought I was going to have a panic attack…."

As he babbled on, he suddenly stopped sinking. Not just that, but soon he actually started to rise back up out of dreaded ooze, precisely as he had hoped. The gawking Wendy didn't quite get what she was looking at, but Mabel was quicker to catch on.

"I've been eating all the toothpaste!" She immediately stopped tween paused to let out a relieved whoop, but only a moment later she started to get dragged under again. "Hey, what gives?"

Dipper noticed with dismay that he too was already sinking again. "I think we have to keep going!"

"Oh, gotcha! Okay, so, uh, the reason we've been running out of toothpaste so fast lately is me!" She regretfully yelped. "I told everyone I wouldn't do it anymore, but Grunkle Stan keeps getting the minty sparkly kind, and when I use it it just looks so shiny and tasty that I just-"

"I get anxious around chickens!" When Wendy got the message, she didn't hold back at all. Once she saw that she was no longer being sucked to her doom, she hurriedly followed her friends' examples. "Okay, so I was four years old, and we were at my aunt's farm. I tried feeding some of them, and….everything just went wrong. I couldn't eat chicken fingers for a year!"

This earned her a full four inches up out of the muck.

"One time when our dad took us to see Santa, I got so nervous that I made myself throw on purpose up so we could go home!" This confession raised Dipper all the way up to his thighs.

"I still keep my old stuffed elephant!" Wendy announced. "Her name is Ellie, and last month when I thought I threw her out by accident, I almost cried!"

"I may not be the most amazing artist in the whole world! Probably not in the top ten, but maybe still in the top twenty-" Mabel started rapidly to go down under again. Hastily she changed her tune. "Uh, a-and also I couldn't remember Grunkle Stan's name yesterday morning! I just said kept saying 'Grunkle Steve' really fast and hoped that he wouldn't notice!"

"...Okay, how did you do that?" Even though they were on the verge of drowning in muck, Dipper couldn't help but pause to ask.

"I was really tired! Remember when I told you it was because I'd been up all night drawing? Well I was actually making a new scarf, but I….I did a bad job! I actually made something and it wasn't that great! It was supposed to be a bunch of cool hearts with sunglasses, but they ended up looking like a bunch of red butts! Stupid red butts!" The little tween suddenly shot up to the point where she could lift her feet free. Wasting no time, she made a frantic beeline for solid ground.

"C'mon...c'mon!" Wendy was still caught by the ankles. The teen rolled her eyes and admitted as hurriedly as she could, "I forgot to do laundry yesterday! I'm wearing a pair of boxers that I stole from one of my brothers!"

Pleased with her honesty, the muck released its tenacious hold and she made a mad dash for safety. That left Dipper still stuck up at shin level. As it started to lug him back down under, he hurriedly wracked his brain.

"Uh….what else….c'mon….think...think…." He actually found himself wishing his crush on Wendy was still a secret.

"SEA CUCUMBER!" Mabel shrieked at the top of her lungs. She flailed her arms and danced about like a girl possessed as she tried to grab his attention."Sea cucumber! Sea cucumber! The sea cucumber!"

"Oh...oh! Oh, yeah!" His memory was speedily jogged. "Once when we went to the aquarium, and I got a sea cucumber stuck in my shirt while we were at the touch-tank! It took two staff to help get it out because I wouldn't stop running around! And this wasn't a while ago either, this happened last year!"

He was now practically standing on top of the mud. Not taking any chances, Wendy leaned as far as her lanky body would stretch, grabbed him by the shoulders, and with Mabel holding her by the waist she yanked him to firm ground. Everyone promptly collapsed on the ground in a heap.

They were all filthy, rattled to their cores, and for at least a minute not a word was uttered as the crimson-faced youths caught their breaths and passed each other awkward glances. Finally, Wendy broke the silence with a loud snort.

"...Okay….so what just happened?" The utter absurdity of the last few minutes started to sink in, and she couldn't help herself. Soon the teen was cracking up uncontrollably."Seriously, what was that? Like…that was just….I don't even know!"

"No idea here either!" Mabel finished popping the tension with a bubbly giggle. "But I almost completely forgot about the sea cucumber until now. Dipper, remember how it almost got down the back of your shorts! Hahaha! Remember? Do you remember? "

"Way too well." The boy gave his sister a thankful pat on the back, and then braved a glance at his snickering friend.

"Good thinking back there." She gave him credit where it was very much due, getting a feeble smile from the boy. Of course he was glad to be alive, but a part of him almost wanted to crawled back and hide in the accursed puddle. "So….uh….that was all…with…."

"Dude, chill." She laughed as she gave him a light shove. "It was either say all that stuff or suffocate. It's like, no contest."

"Yeah….who cares about all that stuff we said? Not this guy." As he nervously forced out a chuckle, beads of nervous sweat on his forehead betrayed him. To put her best friend at ease Wendy kindly pinched a finger and thumb and cinched her lips up tight with an invisible zipper. Dipper happily copied her in kind as together they locked their shared secrets up tight.

"Whatever was mentioned here at the mud hole stays in the mud hole." She announced.

"And how." He gasped, immediately feeling much better. Together they all hauled themselves up to their feet and dragged their partially mud-caked bodies off towards the Shack. "Ugh. So….can we stay inside for the rest of the day now?"

"Uh-huh." Wendy firmly agreed. "I feel like a swamp-thing right now."

"You know, I think that was actually kind of nice!" Mabel remarked, skipping along with a surprising skip in her step. While the others gave her bemused glances, she sweetly clarified with a braced-filled grin, "Well I definitely feel better after gettin' all that off my back! Don't you?"

"Oh, yeah. I liked it so much that I never want to do it again, ever." Her brother deadpanned.

"Y'know, I think Mabel's right. It wasn't all bad...Mr. Christmas Puker." Wendy affectionately dug.

"You forgetting something already?" He zipped his lips again.

"Nope." The corners of her mouth curled mischievously. "Just because I'm not telling anyone else doesn't mean I can't mess with you guys now."

"Alright then…." He wasn't going to take this lying down. "So what's this about chickens?"

"And Ellie?" His sister eagerly chimed in.

"Being attacked by a pack of them completely justified it, and she's doing great. So there." The lanky redhead fired back with a snicker. "Besides, it's better than being a toothpaste-addict."

"Boy underwear!" Mabel playfully taunted back.

"Butt hearts." The teen gleefully retorted, and the preteen giggled.

"Bonding!" Mabel tossed her arms up in the air and happily cheered, right before a realization hit her. "Oooh! And we're probably free for the rest of the day now!"

"Free?" Her twin curiously repeat.

"Yeah! Just think about it, we probably just got allll our Gravity Falls weirdness for the day out of the way nice and early, and now wee-"

It was the work of only a moment. There was a rustle of branches above, and the air suddenly filled with whip-like cracks. Teen and preteens abruptly found themselves nabbed and yanked off the forest floor, and in no time there were dangling upside down in a the firm grip of some bizarrely bright azure vines.

"Aw, c'mon!" Mabel's mood took an immediate dive. "Stupid crazy forest! Why are you so grabby today?"

Wendy sighed wearily. As she search her jeans for her pocket knife, she decided now was as good a time as any to get one final thing off her chest. "You know I never had to deal with any of this kind of stuff until you guys first showed up, right?"

"Last confession of the morning; that makes three of us." Dipper muttered as he leafed through the old journal. "Okay, here we go. 'Embarrassment Ivy….native only to the Gravity Falls, this aggressive plant has the ability to detect when one is feeling particularly…'"